One Pissed-Off Chemistry Nerd
by TheGirlWhoRemembers
Summary: Mac didn't just piss off a bunch of meteorology nerds. Or even a couple more botany nerds. An unfortunate chemistry nerd is stuck in the lab on a Friday night due to the mysterious sabotage of a Western Tech interdepartmental experiment. "Why don't I just drop out? Plenty of successful people are drop-outs!" Tag to 3.03, Bozer and Booze and Back to School.


AN: A silly little tongue-in-cheek humour/parody fic, because I do often wonder what happens to the normal people that Mac's incredible, world-saving/life-saving (not that they know it, half the time) DIY inconveniences…

I mean, Jack loves him so, so much but constantly complains about his phone being destroyed…so what about the people who don't know the truth or that Mac is pretty much an overgrown Golden Retriever puppy with the brains of Bill Nye, Einstein and Ms Frizzle combined?

Also somewhat self-insert, but probably (hopefully) in a way that isn't Mary-Sue-ish or annoys people who don't like this sort of thing….

Spoilers (only kinda) for 3.03, Bozer + Booze + Back to School in the actual story, but far more spoilers in my AN at the end.

* * *

 **BIOLOGICAL AND AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY LABORATORY**

 **WESTERN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY**

 **CALIFORNIA**

* * *

JJ sighed loudly as she dropped her backpack on the floor of the student office.

It was Friday, and after spending her morning collecting and analysing NMR and mass spectrometry data for the latest in the long series of molecules she'd been synthesizing, followed by an afternoon marking freshman laboratory reports and putting together a chapter for her thesis, she'd been looking forward to going back to her apartment just off-campus, ordering some take-out and lazing on the couch while watching HGTV.

(Before waking up in bright and early in the morning – at least, bright and early for a college student - to finish making those corrections to that paper her supervisor wanted to send off for publication ASAP and marking those Chemistry 101 quizzes for the class she was TA for.)

Instead, she was heading back into the lab on a Friday evening to put together another 20 litres of the experimental fertilizer she, her supervisor and some people out of horticultural botany were working on, with the assistance of (and great interest of) meteorology.

It was a brilliant idea in theory.

One that was pretty easy to sell to non-scientists on grant committees.

" _We're making a molecule that will bind really tightly to manganese, an element that's essential for plants' ability to deal with increased sunlight. We're going to design a two-part fertilizer to help farmers and their crops cope with the effects of climate change and increased sunlight and heat. The first part will be manganese stuck to this molecule. The second part will be a manganese releasing agent that they should spray on periodically in small amounts to release the manganese. This will prevent manganese wastage. Oh, and as an added bonus, this will also release nitrogen, another essential element for plants that's usually lacking in soils!"_

That didn't mean it was easy.

Far from it.

(Designing that ligand – the binding molecule - had taken a whole year, which was frankly shorter than both she and her supervisor had expected. Synthesis optimization had taken another half year. Then there was that weak – but not too weak – and bio-compatible, non-ecosystem-damaging-or-perturbing organic acid they'd had to put together to hydrolyze those imine groups…and she was getting worked up and caught up in the science again.)

And now they needed another 20 litres, because some idiot had for some stupid reason popped the weather balloon monitoring their field experiment _and_ stolen the infrared camera to boot right in the middle of their most critical data-collection period.

Which meant that they had to start the whole experiment again, and they needed to start _yesterday,_ or as meteorology and botany told them, they'd have to wait a whole other year for the correct season and climate to roll around again.

Which meant that botany was getting juvenile corn plants ready to plant that night to go into the soil tomorrow (a late nighter – or probably more accurately, _all_ nighter for Larissa, Prithi and Mark), their meteorology collaborators (read: Ed, who was a meteorology PhD who'd done a double major in electrical engineering during undergrad) had to build a new rig for the new weather balloon tonight, and JJ had to get another 20 litres of both parts of the fertilizer ready by the next morning.

JJ sighed again, mentally said goodbye to her Friday night plans, and grabbed her spare hair tie from her desk, pulling her black hair back into a tight, unflattering, but practical and safe ponytail, before grabbing her safety glasses and slotting them in place over her normal glasses.

* * *

She walked into the lab and grabbed her lab coat off one of the hooks by the door, mentally cataloguing what she had to do.

Thankfully, she already had plenty of the ligand, the molecule that bound the manganese.

(Thank God for her supervisor's advice to make it on 36 gram scale. Five times.)

(Even if it'd been a pain in the posterior when she'd been doing it.)

She just needed to titrate in the manganese…

That made her groan anyway.

(Titration was fiddly and boring, even if it was also brilliant in its simplicity and elegance and power as an analytical technique, back in the day before modern conveniences like pH meters.)

And at least she didn't need to set up more reactions for the manganese release agent either. She just had to make up some more buffer (Did they have enough dihydrogen phosphate? If not, she was going to have to beg some off biochemistry…) and slowly and carefully add it in. In the correct concentration, of course, while ensuring the pH remained in that 0.05 window…

Not hard stuff.

Just fiddly.

And not what you wanted to do with your Friday night.

JJ walked into the walk-in fridge to grab her bottle (a literal bottle, much to the surprise of just about everyone else in the lab, who were making quantities of compounds that wouldn't even fill a tiny vial) of ligand, admonishing herself.

'Come on, JJ, this isn't too bad. And you signed up for this, remember? You _did_ decide to do your PhD at Western Tech, instead of going and getting a job at, I don't know, a bank or a consulting firm or something like that…'

* * *

 **SEVEN HOURS LATER**

* * *

JJ turned off the last of the lab lights, hanging up her lab coat and locking the door.

She walked back into the office and tossed her safety glasses onto her desk, pulling out her hair tie and stretching with a groan.

(Titration, when done repeatedly – she could only do 1 litre at a time, for safety reasons – was a really good arm work-out.)

Still, she grinned in satisfaction.

She'd done it.

They had 20 litre of fertilizer (both parts) ready to go for tomorrow morning.

If nothing else went wrong (touch wood!), they'd have all their data in eight weeks.

JJ glanced at the clock in the office as she shouldered her backpack again, and her face fell with another groan.

She'd have to be back here in five hours to deliver the fertilizer.

She walked out of the office door, muttering to herself.

'Why don't I just drop out? Plenty of successful people are drop-outs! Undergrad drop-outs too! I'd be a PhD drop-out…'

She wouldn't do it.

She wasn't even seriously considering it, just letting off some steam.

(She was still really pissed at the idiot who'd ruined their experiment. He or she would be getting a piece of her mind if JJ ever determined their identity and managed to track them down.)

People did all manner of inconvenient, exhausting, unpleasant or even downright dangerous things for love.

Love for a significant other. Love for family. Love for friends.

Or, in JJ's case, love for science.

(She'd bet that that idiot wouldn't get it.)

(She'd bet he'd done it to pledge for Zeta Kappa Tau or something like that.)

(Probably while drunk after setting a new keg stand record or whatever frat boys did.)

* * *

AN: Irony is definitely the name of the game here…

And hey, as someone who has pretty much devoted the last eight months of her life to more-or-less one scientific experiment, I'd be really pissed off at Mac for ruining my experiment! (I'd forgive him if I knew _why_ he'd done it – and probably because being pissed at Mac is like being pissed at a puppy – but if I was kept in the dark, like I assume the scientists in question would be, I'd just be pissed.)

Thoughts on 3.03, Bozer + Booze + Back to School: That was really good fun! I enjoyed it, I laughed a lot (which I needed!), even if it was silly and ridiculous. It looked like the kind of ep that one would have a lot of fun making! Bozer, Riley, Mac and Leanna had a fun, good and believable dynamic and roles in this one in my opinion (it was better than Hammock + Balcony, I think). The touch with Mac getting an honorary degree was really nice (and I think it harks back to the original show, where he's a Western Tech graduate?). I also liked the Jack and Billy side-story, though I wish they could have devoted more screen-time to it (this was a short ep, I think, they could have done it…). Jack and Billy definitely needed to talk about Riley and Billy's relationship, and that job offer. I liked how neither of them were completely 'right' and both had some pretty good points (though I generally agreed more with Billy, I see where Jack's coming from and it was in-character in my book). I also think they're laying ground work for conflict (or potentially a break-up) between Riley and Billy (that heavily involves Jack) with Billy's attitude towards criminals/skips (which is perfectly valid/probably necessary considering his job) and Jack's actions, plus the stuff with the job offer…it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.


End file.
